This "Unawareable" Smart Cup Tracks Your Vitamin C Levels — And Draws Power From Your Sweat
"We're moving toward a future of 'unawareables' — devices that are unobtrusive and essentially invisible," says professor Patrick Mercier,.
Researchers from the University of California San Diego and the University of California have designed an "unawareable" smart cup that can track your vitamin C levels — even as you boost them with a shot of orange juice.
"By turning everyday objects like cups or bottles into smart sensors, people can gain real-time insights into their health and wellness without changing a thing about their daily routine," says co-senior author Patrick Mercier, professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, of the team's work. "We're moving toward a future of 'unawareables' — devices that are unobtrusive and essentially invisible so that you are unaware that you’re even using them. You just go about your day and your drinking cup can give you access to all this rich information."
The team's creation is a designed to be added to a standard drinking cup, and takes the form of a flexible sticker sheet with screen-printed components. As the drinker grips the cup, sweat is collected from the fingertips on a porous hydrogel gel — not only to feed a sensor capable of determining the drinker's vitamin C levels but for conversion to energy, with a biofuel cell serving in place of a battery. The results are then transmitted to a smartphone or other device via Bluetooth Low Energy.
"Most people only get a snapshot of their health once a year at the doctor. But our bodies change much more frequently than that," Mercier adds. "We want to make access to health data as frequent and effortless as holding your morning coffee cup or orange juice bottle."
"This is an elegant extension of our early fingertip sweat-based technology toward effortless, continuous monitoring of personal nutrition and health," says fellow co-senior author Joseph Wang, professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "By moving sensors from the skin to the surface of everyday objects like cups or bottles, we are expanding what wearable technology can be."
The team's work has been published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics under closed-access terms; no route to commercialization has been disclosed, but the researchers estimate that the sensors could be produced in bulk for mere cents per unit.
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